New York

Rating:
Summary: Stirring Photos, Powerful Introduction
Review: I met Bernd at a German bar on the Lower East Side last October and crossed paths with him again on New Year's Eve. Until then, I knew Bernd only as the man who borrowed my cheap digital camera to shoot some shots for his scrapbook. The shots were OK, nothing special, so I was absolutely blown away when I saw what he did professionally. He gave me a copy of this book on New Year's Eve, and I have since sent copies to a dozen friends around the country and overseas. Technically, the photographs are superb -- uncanny in their use of natural lighting, deep shadows and perspective. But what makes these black-and-whites of New York and New Yorkers so memorable is that the sum is greater than the parts. Bernd's camera leads us past New York's magnificence and its squalor, but deposits us home again with wondrous, renewed pride in our city's ability time-and-again to spawn change and diversity, and to make the most of adversity. I think it is fitting that it took an outsider, a kindly German photographer with a penchant for wild Beethoven-like hair, to present New York the way it is.